


Candlelight

by orphan_account



Series: When The Day Met The Night [1]
Category: Soul Eater
Genre: (Sorta) Established Relationship, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Missing Scene
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-03
Updated: 2014-02-03
Packaged: 2018-01-11 01:02:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,778
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1166745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When the power goes out in Death City, Maka spends the night in Crona's room to keep him comforted.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Candlelight

**Author's Note:**

> So I've decided to do one of those Drabble Challenges for my Soul Eater OTP, which is Crona/Maka, and I'm going off of some list I found that has single words as prompts. This is the first of (hopefully) many though it turned out being way longer than a drabble, lol.
> 
> Anyway this is one of my favorite parings in any show ever, and there's way too little fic about their relationship so feel free to watch as I sit here and add a whole bunch of my rambly words to the CroMa canon~
> 
> Most of these are going to be "missing scene" meta moments that are meant to take place between Chapter 24 and Chapter 32 in the manga (that’s anime episodes 26 through like 33-ish or something). Some will veer off from there eventually though and follow the manga storyline when they do, as opposed to the anime storyline.
> 
> (Edit 2/7: I'm also gonna be putting dates at the beginning of these because I'm not gonna go in linear time order, but I hve no clue whether these were the actual dates in the canon story, lol)

**01\. Candlelit**

**  
**- _October 27, 2009 -_

Maka’s been having dreams about Crona lately. Ever since she held him after their second battle she’s been dreaming of him really, but lately, the dreams have been of the more romantic variety.

In the one she has tonight, she and Crona are in his room in the dungeon at night. Maka is outside of her own body, gazing down at the two of them from someplace above. She can see herself and him standing in the middle of room, wrapped in each other’s arms; Crona’s hands rest around her lower back and his head rests in the crook of her shoulder. It looks as if they’re slow-dancing, even though there’s no music, and the moonlight from the room’s sole window falls on them like a spotlight.

Crona whispers something into Maka’s ear, but as she’s somehow exited her body she can’t hear what it is. Crona then kisses her, his hands slipping round her back tighter, and she feels this pull like she wants to be back inside her body to feel him, but also that it’s captivating to watch what she doesn’t usually get to see. From where she is, she can see the way Crona’s hands tremble at her back; she can see the way his brow pinches like her kisses are devastating him, the way his hips gravitate towards her and his knees seem to be struggling not to give out, the way he looks weak.

In the brightness of the moonlight, Maka can see how much her being with him really does affect him. She watches as Crona pulls away and gazes at her, saying more whispered words and then nervously pulling at the hem of her shirt—something he never does outside her dreams—helping her tug it over her head and slowly roaming his hands across her now-naked back.

Maka feels that frustrated pull again, like she’s straining to get a closer look and like she can’t see him clearly enough. Just then, it’s as if something knocks Crona’s focus out of alignment and calls his name; he pauses abruptly, hesitation coloring his cheeks, and then slowly backs away, glances up at the place Maka’s point of view is watching from.

When he sees that she’s somehow outside of her body, he jumps away from the body in front of him like he’s just seen a ghost, and suddenly the moonlight from outside cuts out, the room becoming nothing but blackness.

And when Maka wakes up from her dream, her bedroom is pitch black as well.

She glances over at the clock— _it’s only eight,_ she thinks sheepishly—and wonders why it’s so dark in here. The light from the living room isn’t still flooding in the doorway like it was when she fell asleep, and neither is the light from her desk lamp, but Soul has to still be awake and in the house since she can hear voices in the next room.

Maka slowly gets out of bed, hair ruffled up from the bed and a blank around her shoulders, fumbling around with her feet for her slippers. When she wanders into the living room, she finds all the lights out in there too, sans a faint, orange glow coming from behind the couch. When she walks over she sees Soul, Tsubaki and Black Star sitting on the floor surrounded by candles, with beer cans and playing cards around them.

She frowns when they all look up at her.

“Blackout,” Soul offers, shrugging. “Been like this a few hours.”

Maka sighs and takes a seat on the floor next to her partner.

Had she really been asleep that long? She intended to just take a short nap as a stress reliever; it’s a Saturday, but she’s been devoting the weekend to studying for a big midterm exam come Monday (unlike the rest of her friends, she sees). She was at it for six hours this afternoon in the library, and eight yesterday, pretty much only taking breaks to eat and sleep…oh, and visit with Crona.

“Hey Maka, nice try trying to style your hair like mine but yours just looks like you stuck your finger in a socket,” Black Star says of Maka’s bed hair, and Tsubaki promptly shushes him. Maka ignores the twitching urge she feels to grab a book.

“Wait, why are you two here?” she asks, glancing over at Tsubaki and Black Star, shrouded in shadows. The latter cracks open a new beer; she makes a face. “And where’d you get all this beer from?”

“Sid doesn’t keep a good enough eye on his stash, that’s where,” says Black Star.

“And we’re here because the power is out at our place too,” Tsubaki says. “We came over because we thought maybe it was just us, but it turns out the whole city is like this.”

Maka would ask what happened tonight, but figures they’re just as clueless as she is.

 “It’s pretty trippy,” Soul adds. “If you look out the window right now you can’t see a thing.”

Maka picks herself up and makes her way to the window, perching herself on the sill. Death City is indeed completely shrouded in blackness, and so is the sky, since it’s a new moon. From her and Soul’s apartment, she can usually see Shibusen all lit up at the top of its hill, but now all she can vaguely make out is the shadowy shapes of the spires poking out from the roof, pitched against the near-pitch sky. No lights are coming from inside the building or anywhere nearby, which means that everyone inside there right now…

Which means that everyone _underneath_ the building right now…

“Crona!”

The other three start and turn to look at her.

“I have to get to him, he’s already been there by himself for _hours_ —”

Maka jumps off the sill suddenly and darts in the direction of the kitchen. The others can hear as she rattles open a drawer in the next room. She blocks out the image of Crona sitting alone in that corner, triggered and rendered motionless by a nightmare from his past—or worse, sitting there with _Ragnarok_ beating on him like a nightmare from his past—and frantically feels around for the extra candles she knows are there. She grabs eight or nine and slams the drawer back shut, then, with them bundled under one arm, she stops to pick up one of the lit candles next to Soul and half-runs towards the front door.

“Maka—” prompts Soul.

 “I have to get to him,” she repeats, reaching to grab her jacket from its hook on the wall, “Who knows how long the lights will be out and he shouldn’t be in a room like that by himself all night—“

“He’s just as old as we are, right?” Black Star questions. “Pretty sure he wouldn’t still be afraid of the dark...”

“And besides, there are other people who stay overnight at school aren’t there?” Soul posits. “Maybe he wandered around and found some company or something.”

Maka knows Crona better than that. When she fumbles around for the doorhandle, still hardheaded to reach him, Soul stands.

“Wait, you can’t go by yourself—” he attempts.

Maka huffs out, “I’ll be fine,” and the door slams shut behind her, leaving the room quiet.

Soul only hesitates for a moment before sitting back down and shaking his head.

“Aren’t you s’posed to go run after her or whatever?” Black Star says.

Soul smiles. “Nah. Hell or highwater she’s gonna see him tonight, with or without me. When she sets her mind to something she does it, and she’s been set on this guy since she got inside his soul.”

\--

Maka makes her way towards school at a steady pace in the dark, jacket and blanket wrapped firmly around shoulders. It’s not too hard to traipse through Death City with the candle she took for light, always illuminating the road a foot or two before her, but there are a few times some noises and shadows from the alleys startle her on the way; thankfully she’s been to school so many times that she’s memorized how to get there in about ten minutes, and thankfully it’s not yet ten P.M. so the giant, front doors to the academy haven’t been locked yet.

Once inside, she runs down the empty main hall and straight for the dungeon stairwell on the first floor. By the time she gets down it and reaches Crona’s door at the end of one way, she’s nearly out of breath—she knocks on the door twice, rattles the handle to find it locked, and then calls out for him.

“Crona? It’s Maka—“

On the other side of the door, Crona is, as Maka figured, cramped up in a corner, face to his knees, breathing labored, limbs trembling. His hands are balled into fists in his hair, his back is sore from Ragnarok’s fists and he can’t remember how long it’s been dark, but the voice at the door makes him flinch, his stomach lurching and triggering more nausea.

It’s her outside that door. It was only ever her, she’s found him somehow and is punishing him in this room the way she always used to. It was a joke that he ever thought he was safe here, even though they said she was gone she always told him she’d be there for him, and she’s waiting now, this whole Shibusen thing was just a set-up. The time he’d spent in happiness was just a cruel trick she’d been playing to make him think he’d gotten away, to reprimand him for ever trying and even Maka has been in on it, he’s a horrible person and will never be forgiven for all that blood—

“Crona?”

He swallows around the stony lump in his throat.

That voice _sounds_ gentle, but then Medusa did used to know how to sound deceptively sweet, didn’t she?

“If you’re in there, I brought you some light,” the voice continues.

His heart feels like it’s Maka, but then he’s still so anxious to trust his heart…it even used to love _her_ regardless sometimes, even after all the times she tortured him, left him all alone…

More knocks, slower and gentler this time, but Crona clenches his eyes tighter and hugs his knees closer, tenses even harder at the thought of his mother. It gets worse when he feels the dull pain of Ragnarok surging beneath the skin of his back again, and this really is just like back then, isn’t it? with Ragnarok a permanent reminder of the woman who’d always own him. Crona winces at the familiar thunk of the weapon clobbering around on top of his head.

“It’s the cow-bitch outside, you idiot,” Ragnarok squeaks, grabbing onto Crona’s hands and rattling his head back and forth; the boy lets out a muffled whimper into his knees. “You know she’ll stand there all night waiting for you, so let her in so I don’t have to listen to her keep knocking like that!”

“Hey! I told you stop calling me ‘cow-bitch’!” comes Maka’s voice from outside.

Crona opens his eyes only to finds the same darkness in front of him, the room as black as the shut of his eyelids. He can’t even tell _what_ room he’s in anymore as the stone wall at his back feels the same as _that one_ did and what if he’s been in that house with her this whole time? Time lost on one when they’re in darkness for days, and here he is in darkness once again—

“Just you try to stop me!” Ragnarok yells back at Maka, thudding his fists against Crona’s head and making it throb— “Ragnarok, please, stop,” Crona’s voice is rough from disuse— “You’re not the boss of either of us, you heifer!”

The doorknob rattles once more.

“Crona,” Maka says softly.

There’s a pause. Crona keeps his eyes open, waiting raptly to hear the voice speak again.

“If you don’t want to let me in, that’s okay,” she says. “But remember that I’m always right here, okay?”

This voice has to be different from his mother’s, he thinks. This voice makes him want to feel things, to feel warm. It’s soothing.

 “Only if you want to, you can find me out here.”

His heart skips a beat, he swallows, and then he hears something moving against the door—the sound of Maka sitting up against it.

In moments like these, Maka feels as though she is a stranger to Crona.

Like the door against her back is keeping her from a world she cannot understand, a darkness that Crona carries with him so thick that his sanity had once suffocated in it. As well as she’s come to know him thus far, there’s still a part within him that is shrouded in mystery and privacy, hidden beneath even her view of his soul. Whatever it was he went through as a child, whatever horrors he witnessed as he constantly slipped in and out of that darkness, finding his body coated in others’ blood in its wake and not knowing whether it thrilled him or sickened him—that is the Crona she does not know, the twisted boy infected by the black blood within him, the fourteen year old who’s suffered things that age him beyond his years.

Maka shivers a little. It’s cold in the hall and she’s cold whenever she thinks about what Crona must be up against. She huddles in on herself more, holding the candle near to her face and closing her eyes. For a moment she wants to feel helpless, but she tries to hold onto the hope that she really is helping him.

The dream she had earlier comes back to mind…the way Crona looked as she kissed him, weak and overwhelmed, makes her head swim when she thinks about it. But then again, Maka also feels somewhat guilty; for _liking_ that weakness, for wanting to see it up close, for being such a girl and wanting Crona in a very human, romantic way that she’s not sure he can handle fully reciprocating.

She thinks about it a lot, now. It didn’t help that they’d had their first kiss not long after he got there, that she’s been sleeping in his bed and holding him, that Crona, though this is his first time experiencing human contact, is open to the intimacy, even though he shakes each time she guides him thought it. Being so physically close to Crona so often in her everyday life was of course going to cause stronger urges for him to fester; she’s fourteen and so is he, and this is the first time she’s really been touched by a boy but she’s been dreaming about it for years, and her feelings towards _this_ boy were bound to run deep because she’d been to a place in his soul where noone else had been before. But she tries not to think about the idea that she may be an intruder, that wanting to be with Crona physically is selfish, that drawing this close and kissing him so eagerly so soon after his trauma may be doing more harm than good.

On the other side of the door, Crona is still too scared to move, at first.

He stays tucked in on himself in the corner a while longer, plugging his ears as Ragnarok continues to hit him and taunt him—“stop being a pansy and open the door!”—to which he can sometimes hear Maka’s faint rebuttals from outside.

What feels like an hour passes, and after Ragnarok’s slipped back under his skin due to irritation, Crona lets his hands fall from his face, slowly flattens them out against the cold floor. His fingers follow along the rough ridges of the stone; this doesn’t feel like the tile from home, those floors were smooth; this doesn’t feel like that place. His eyes still staring into blackness, he relaxes his posture somewhat, propping himself up onto his knees and shakily crawling away from the corner.

 _“I’m always right here, okay?”_ Her familiar voice echoes in his head. _“Only if you want to, you can find me out here.”_

“Maka?”

His heart sinks at the second of pause, but she responds a beat later.

“Yeah.” That’s her voice, clear as day. “I’m still here.”

Crona crawls forward, opens the door, and finds Maka sitting in the hallway holding a single candle, hair down and eyes calm.

Maka’s chest feels tight when she sees the frail boy hunched over behind the door. In Crona’s dark eyes there is leftover distress, and a flicker of a vulnerable and distrustful fear, displaced onto Maka, meant for someone else.

Wordlessly, she stands up, and Crona unsteadily tries to do the same. He moves back a little to let her in, then closes the door behind them.

Maka quickly settles down on the floor and starts to light up all the candles she brought. She uses the sole flame from the first candle to give a second one life; Crona watches as the glow catches on, as the aura of each flickers near her face and each candle gradually begins to shine as she sets them up all over the floor. One by one, they start to fill the room with a soft, orange glow, making shadows dance along the tall walls, casting their forms against it, and Crona starts to see familiar things appear all around him, tucked away against the walls—the checkered bed in the corner, the outline of the window up high on the wall, the lamp, powerless on the desk—

Crona looks around the dungeon room, at its stones, at the furniture, at the floor, and then at Maka, who’s placing the last candle on the corner of his desk, near the lamp. When he looks at the lamp, the shade of it woven with a beautiful thread, he remembers the first few nights he spent in this room, each of them nights of a new moon like this one. It had gotten so dark that he’d panicked every night, unable to sleep and hyperventilating in the corner. When he told Maka he couldn’t sleep well a few days later, she first told him that if he ever needed her to stay with him, he could always ask (which he didn’t know how to deal with at first, so she’d invited herself over in time); and then she bought him a lamp from the antique store to keep on on nights she couldn’t be by his side.

When it went off with the power tonight, he couldn’t see a thing again. For some reason it’d made him feel like he’d forgotten who he was now, or where he was now. But now…

Now all of a sudden, he’s not alone in that room anymore, and Maka has appeared before him, an angel shrouded in light.

It’s becoming the story of his life, really.

She looks at him from across his room with those pretty, olive eyes and his stomach gets butterflies.

He gazes down at the candles on the floor, running a hand across the back of his neck.

“How did you know to bring these for me?” he asks.

“I’m always thinking about you,” Maka says, like it’s so simple. “When I woke up and realized that the power was out, I thought about you down here by yourself and wanted to make sure you were okay.”

Maka walks back towards the center of the room, removing the blanket from her shoulders and smoothing it out across the floor, sitting on it. Crona stays standing a few feet away, unsure of whether he should move.

“Are you okay?” Maka looks hesitant about sitting, now. “I can go back if you want.” She starts to stand. “You can keep the candles, I don’t—“

“No,” Crona interrupts. “I—I want you here.”

He sits cross-legged on the blanket too as Maka settles back down, and sighs, shutting his eyes, to release his tension.

 _Breathe,_ Crona thinks.Maka used to have to tell him, but now he can hear her voice telling him in his head. He takes a deep breath, and Maka watches; the inhale is deep but the exhale is shaky, his shoulders shudder and he shivers. He presses his lips together, nearly biting down on them, and Maka holds out her hands towards him at the same time he reaches for them.

Their fingers clasp and Crona squeezes her hands very slowly, over and over, breathing in time with the pressure of each squeeze to help him focus. It takes a long time for that to calm him; she watches as he eventually opens his eyes, focuses on the laces of their hands, at the press of their skin. Then after some time he’s back to breathing silently, and his hands go limp. She supports them in her own, and he stares down at the floor and she says nothing. Waiting, she lets him process whatever’s going on in his mind; she can only imagine.

After a while, Crona takes one hand and wipes his eyes—she hadn’t realized he’d been starting to cry—sitting up perfectly straight and looking at her solemnly.

“Are you tired, Maka?” Crona says.

She smiles softly to assure him.

“No, I’m okay. I took way too long of a nap earlier so I’ll probably be up for a while.”

He nods once and then sighs again, looking somber.

“I don’t know why this keeps happening,” he says, eyes flickering down to the floor in embarrassment. “I get—when it gets too dark, I always think that I—“ He can’t finish the thought.

Maka gently runs her thumb over his knuckles.

“It’ll just take more time to get used to being here, that’s all,” she reminds him. “We talked about this.”

Crona’s eyes shyly find their way back to hers; he blushes once they meet and the butterflies’ wings flutter rapidly.

“Yes, but…” He pauses and the look in Maka’s eyes softens. “I don’t want my time here with you to be over.” He stares at their hands, at the slow circles Maka’s thumb is drawing across his skin. “I-I keep thinking that it’s going to end somehow, and I…”

“No matter what, you’re always going to have me,” Maka says, and she’ll say it over and over. She squeezes his hand. “Always, okay?”

Crona nods, and Maka kisses the top of one of his hands.

Though his hands start to tremble in response, he takes hers and presses them to his lips, kissing his “thank you”s against them, their eyes still locked.

Maka moves to lay down on her side on the blanket, still keeping one hand tangled in Crona’s and he leads where she follows, facing her on his side as well. They hold hands and gaze at each other, eyes saying more than words could, candlelight around them dancing across each other’s features.

Maka notices the shadows beneath Crona’s eyes, the way his lashes fan out and the shape of his eyes, so round and alien, the irises so velvety dark. She recognizes his distinctive bone structure, its slight otherness and sharpness and the way his beige skin, stretched thinly over it, is stained by an dark, otherworldly blush. It all reminds her that he’s not all human, and it makes her fascination with him spark anew like it does every time she gets to look at him closely. She focuses her eyes on his lips; the lower is fuller, pink and naturally swollen and she thinks she’s starting to memorize the way it feels against her own. She does not kiss him now, though. She simply looks, admiring the way that Crona’s face reflects who he is on the inside as well.

And for Crona, Maka is so stabilizing, so calming; looking into her eyes tonight remind him of the clear water that laps gently at the shores of his soul now, constant, giving, reviving, and kind. Her skin looks so clear and soft, and he wants very badly to run his fingers down her cheek so he moves his hand to, though he frowns a bit and is hesitant; when he pauses before touching her, tenses and the timidity and the fear she recognizes slowly widens in his eyes, she catches his hand in hers again and draws it to her own face. She closes her eyes then, and as Crona stares, it scares him to think that he wants nothing else but to feel her skin against the palm of his hand, but to touch another, real person as proof of his survival from the nightmare.

These emotions, this desire to be close to her, this light he finds himself lying in with her, it’s all a world she introduced and one he never could’ve imagined happening; he feels its unfair that somehow someone in his life could be so compassionate towards him, what could he’ve done to deserve it?

Maka Albarn may only be a dream, he thinks sometimes…a tactile and intimate and soft to the touch dream, but even if she is he wants never to wake, never to walk outside his room and find the nightmare still waiting for him; he would rather waste away and die here in her imaginary arms if she’s not real.

No, Crona doesn’t want to think about that; he takes a deep breath, closes his eyes, and tells himself that all of this is real no matter how much doubt he may still have—he really is safe and sound at Shibusen, he really has met this wonderful person who cares and wants to help him, his mother really is gone, and fresh water runs through the rivers of his soul for the first time, quenching the drought he did not know would ever end.

_No matter what, you’re always going to have me._

They lie there across from each other, eyes shut, minds at ease. Crona’s hand cradles her jaw and hers rests on top of his, and opens her eyes after some time to find that Crona is starting to fall asleep. She moves his hand back down to rest on the blanket, moves in closer to him, and softly kisses his forehead, cradling his head in her hand.

Before long, she can hear his gentle snores.

Maka stares at the dungeon ceiling, grateful that Crona can rest now in the dim flicker of candelight. As she moves to reposition herself onto other side, she hears Crona groan faintly in his sleep. She turns back over, watching as a thick streak of black blood creeps out of his back and materializes as Ragnarok, situating itself on Crona’s head and staring at Maka with its eerie, round white eyes.

 “You’re not gonna keep getting away with this you know,” Ragnarok squeaks.

 Maka smiles.

“I’m sorry that you still don’t like me,” she replies quietly, “but you’re gonna have to keep getting used to me.” She glances down at Crona, who’s frowning a little, but still asleep. “I care about him a lot,” she adds, smile fading, and her eyes meet Ragnarok’s strong and resolute. “And I don’t give up just because someone or something is tough.”

Ragnarok growls. “We don’t need you, you scrawny little parasite!”

“You’re one to talk!” Maka whispers harshly.

Ragnarok gives up on the argument sooner than she expects, grumbling some slur as he slides back beneath Crona’s skin, and the room is quiet once again. Maka looks at Crona again, and remnants of Ragnarok words echo in her mind— _you won’t get away with this, he doesn’t need you—_

If the thoughts start to create a pit of doubt in her stomach, Maka instantly tries to bury the uneasy feeling. Instead, she moves in closer to Crona and runs her fingers through the tresses of his hair, softly kissing him on the forehead, reminding him of her over and over.

 _I know you’ll be okay._ She cradles Crona’s face in her hands in the way that she knows comforts him, hoping he can feel her affection for him even in his sleep.

_I know you will._

In his dreams, Crona and Maka are on the beach, and the ocean is cleansing his soul.

And all night, Maka watches the candles slowly burn and the sky begin to lighten outside with the sun, finally falling asleep when the room is light enough that Crona will feel safe when he awakens.


End file.
